[governance] Declaration of Internet Freedom

[Jeremy Malcolm]

Most of you have probably seen the Declaration of Internet Freedom that
is going around; see http://www.internetdeclaration.org/freedom.

It's not very good.

For one thing, it's very high-level and vague, so that if you look at
the discussions, people are making all sorts of extrapolations from it
like "if we have the ability to save something on our hard drives, we
should have the right to freely copy and share it", arguing about
whether anonymity is or is not included, etc.  It's just pretty sloppy
and unhelpful.

For another, although a lot of groups have signed on to it, it seems to
have been developed by a fairly narrow segment of US-based groups and
entrepreneurs, and there was no serious attempt to reach out ahead of
its launch yesterday.  Even a lot of people who are usually in the loop
hadn't heard about it until the last minute.  At least one major
European digital rights group has decided not to sign on.

Also, it contains no explicit mention of human rights, and the clear
emphasis is on the interests of the Internet industry rather than users
or non-user citizens/consumers (note the emphasis given, for such a
short document, to the principle "don't punish innovators for their
users' actions").  Whilst I agree with the principle, it's not the first
thing I'd include.

All that being said, these are just my views.  Does the IGC want to sign
onto it?

-- 

*Dr Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Policy Officer*
Consumers International
Kuala Lumpur Office for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East
Lot 5-1 Wisma WIM, 7 Jalan Abang Haji Openg, TTDI, 60000 Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia
Tel: +60 3 7726 1599

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